For the past several months, I have been conducting research into the leadership of change to learn more about the role leadership plays in successful change. Frankly, I have been disappointed in what I have found. More accurately, I have been disappointed in what I haven’t found – an access to leadership.
The primary focus of leadership research and writing seems to be dominated by a conception of leadership as associated with someone in a formal position of leadership (i.e., authority) and by a focus on the extrinsic outcomes of the characteristics or behaviors of the leader. Accordingly, attention is given to identifying the characteristics and/or behaviors that differentiate effective leaders from ineffective leaders on the assumption that once identified, we can select or train leaders for these characteristics or behaviors, thereby improving leadership.
What I find troubling about this approach, however, is that it says nothing about the source of the behaviors leaders exhibit or how one might gain access to those behaviors. Knowing what respect is and that effective leaders show respect does not mean that I can show respect when it is needed or that I can show it in an appropriate or acceptable way. There is not a one-to-one correspondence between any personality characteristic, cognitive capability, affective orientation, or situational condition and any leader behavior. What this means is that none of these factors are THE source or cause of leader behaviors and learning them will not make me a leader or necessarily more effective.
No, I think we are missing something and I think it has to do with the idea that the actions we take and the behaviors we engage in are a function of how situations and people occur to us. In their book, The Three Laws of Performance, Zaffron and Logan point out that how people perform is not determined by the objective nature of the situation, but rather is correlated with how the situation occurs to them. If, for example, the actions and behaviors of another occur as resistance to a change agent, the agent is likely to respond much differently than if those same actions and behaviors occur as a contribution to improving the change.
The idea that one’s actions correlate with how situations occur suggests that the access to leader behaviors, in both form and quality, is to be found in how things occur for people. It also suggests that leaders can alter their behaviors, in both form and quality, by learning how to shift the way situations occur. Zaffron and Logan have some ideas on how to do that that may be worth pursuing.
